IoT is no small thing any longer. With smart phones, smart tablets, smart refrigerators, smart buildings and smart cities, it’s a given that there is a lot of money to be made in the IoT industry. With IoT growing by leaps and bounds and predictions being that it will grow to a trillion and a half dollars by 2020, everyone wants a piece of that pie.

The IoT companies that have the most to offer and are taking away most of the consumers at this point in time—the heavy hitters in IoT are the companies that should all be watching. The question is—who are they?

The top IoT movers and shakers for 2017 –based on those who did the most with IoT in 2016 appear to be these: ( listed in alphabetical order, not necessarily by order of importance)

Amazon. With tools like Echo and Amazon AWS and Kinesis, Amazon scores big on the IoT scene by offering increasingly powerful services and tools for users.

AT&T with their broadband network is slated to be a key enabler of the IoT forces. The M2X will also play an important role in that along with Data Flow, the development portal for IoT.

Bosch—the German wizards of home appliances also make enterprise software. They say that their range of appliances and products will now be connected to IoT to make monitoring and maintenance easier. This will make them one of the key companies in IoT.

Cisco, which company terms the IoT the Internet of Everything is slated to be one of the main companies that will be enablers of Iot in every form. Cisco is creating a whole new niche for themselves by their provision of switching, routing, wireless access points and network hardware for connecting and communicating with IoT devices.

Google—Always in the lead in nearly anything they undertake, Google has made it a point to take hold of the IoT reins and put themselves at least in the top ten companies by the purchase of smart thermostat maker NEST, that could expand to bring in all manner of smart home systems.

IBM—The Watson smart products will be what lands IBM as a mover and shaker in the IOT space if they have anything to say about it. A combination of cloud development and production arenas for apps, IBM has a little of everything to offer the cloud development community.
These powerhouses, joined by Huawei, Hitachi, Samsung, and yes, even Microsoft, are the companies to watch—and to beat if you’re looking at it as a competition. The question is not whether they will give us great products and services—we already know the answer to that one–most of them will. The bigger question is and one that is and will continue to be a sticking point for the consumer is– with the race to market we’ve been seeing from a lot of these companies, in their haste, can we depend on them to secure their IoT space as well?